Dual Licensure

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Dual Licensure Evolving Best Practice and
On-Going Implications for Resource Family Support
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Dual LicensureEvolving Best practice and
Ongoing Implications for Resource Family
Recruitment

• Results of Research by
• The National Resource Center for Foster Care and
• Permanency Planning
• Funded By
• The Casey National Center for Resource Family
  Support
• Completed By
• Gary Mallon, DSW

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Background
Historical child welfare practice did not allow
foster parents to adopt or they strongly
discouraged them from doing so through written
and unwritten rules. As recently as the early
1970s, most public adoption agencies had
policies against practice of foster parent
adoption.
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Reasons Included

• Fear of losing their valuable cadre of foster
  families.
• Fear that foster families hoping to adopt, would
  undermine attempts to attain the primary goal of
  family reunification.
• Historical licensure processes that were based on
  a foster families ability to provide temporary
  care, not a lifetime commitment.
• Decisions to place a child in a particular foster
  home frequently were based on available space and
  not because a foster family was determined to be
  the best possible match for a particular child

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For these reasons and others, a child who became
freed for adoption and who was doing well living
with a foster family, would have in the past been
moved to another family without allowing the
foster parent to have any input into the process
of selection of the adoptive family or even
continued contact with the child, thus
exacerbating the childs experiences with loss,
lack of continuity and permanent relationships.
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Today, child welfare practice reflects a very
different picture.

• The increasing reality is that foster parents,
  and not newly recruited adoptive parents, have
  come to serve as the most consistent and viable
  option for permanence for children in care.

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According to the Childrens Bureau Express, 64
of children adopted from the child welfare system
are adopted by their foster parents (although not
necessarily the families with whom they were
first placed). Not only are foster parents
adopting children in their care, but according to
the National Adoption Information Clearinghouse,
these placements are very successful with 94
percent of these adoptions remaining intact
throughout the life of the child.
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The Promise of Permanency
It appears that the promise of permanency for
children in the child welfare system who are
unable to return to their birth parents, lies in
many instances with their foster parents
relatives or non-relatives. Because of this,
seasoned child welfare staff have been working to
ensure that once a foster family has bonded with
the child and made the commitment to adopt, the
standards, rules and process of transitioning
from a foster parent to an adoptive parent is as
smooth and seamless as possible. In this vein,
some child welfare agencies are beginning to
explore the development of dual licensure
policy and practice.
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Permanency for children Implies

• Intent - while a permanent home or family may not
  be certain to last forever, it is one that is
  intended to last indefinitely and offers the hope
  of lifetime connections and support.
• Commitment and continuity in family relationships
  - a permanent family is meant to survive
  geographic moves and the vicissitudes of life
  because it involves commitment and sharing a
  common future - whether with the family of
  origin, an adopted family, or a guardianship
  family

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Permanency for children Implies

• Sense of belonging to a family - evolves from
  commitment, continuity, and social/legal status -
  is critical to security and positive self-esteem,
  and paves the way to healthy growth and
  development
• Legal and social status - there is a need to
  overcome the second class status associated with
  temporary or long-term foster care, and
  legitimize a childs place in a legally permanent
  family a family that offers a child a
  definitive legal status separate from the child
  welfare system protects his or her rights and
  interests, and promotes a sense of belonging.

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Permanency Planning Is.

• a process ... of helping a child to live in a
  home which offers the hope of establishing
  lifetime family relationships...all children have
  a right to a permanent family. It is our job to
  ensure that they get one and in a timely manner
  (Terpstra 1986).
• a philosophy ... that seeks first to preserve
  and support the child's biological family
  environment... and when this is not possible, to
  secure an adoptive family...(Cole 1985)

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Permanency Planning Is.

• a collection of services and programs ...
  delivered in behalf of children...in the effort
  to secure for each child a caring, legally
  recognized, continuous family in which to grow
  up...(Cole 1985)
• a strategy ... designed to help children live
  in families that offer continuity of
  relationships with nurturing parents or
  caretakers and the opportunity to establish
  lifetime relationships (Maluccio and Fein 1983)

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PERMANENCY PLANNING OUTCOMES

• Children remain safely with their parents or
  relatives
• Children are reunified safely with their parents
  or relatives
• Children are safely adopted by relatives or other
  families
• Children are safely placed with relatives or
  other families as legal guardians
• Children are safely placed in another planned
  alternative permanent living arrangement

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Dual Licensurea vehicle to Permanency?
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• Dual licensure means that foster parents and
  adoptive parents walk through the same screening
  and interview, home study, training and
  background check processes, and in the end
  receive the same approval to provide foster
  and/or adoptive care.
• Dual licensure allows for a foster parent, who
  has cared for a child for some length of time, to
  naturally and easily change their role from that
  of a foster parent to an adoptive parent, without
  having to go through an entirely new home study
  and training process.

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Default or Design?
Because the adoption of children by their foster
families has historically occurred by default
rather than by design, during the survey of
states that had some form of dual licensure, we
felt compelled to ask the question Is the
adoption of children by their foster families
really best practice? What do you think?
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Comments from State Representatives
Scott Dixon, Foster Care Specialist from the
State of Texas has an interesting perspective.
It used to be that when foster parents adopted
children, they were perceived as seeking a back
door adoption. By opening the process up, it
allows both adoptive parents and foster parents
to be completely honest about their struggles and
their motivations. While a foster family may be
very clear that they do not want to adopt every
child that comes into their home, if one comes
who has no other place to go and the family bonds
with that childthey have a choiceone that they
can discuss openly while making an informed
decision.   Kit Hansen, President of the Utah
Foster Parent Association and foster mother
agrees. About eight years ago I remember
vividly a circumstance where two children who had
been in foster care for eight months, were
abruptly pulled from the foster home and never
saw the family again. These children were
attached to the foster family and the foster
family was devastated at the loss. This should
never occur.  
 
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Comment from the Childrens Bureau
Patsy Buida, the Foster Care Specialist at the
Childrens Bureau ACF/DHHS suggests It (dual
licensure) is a tool to maximize use of resource
families in a flexible way that lets them decide
how to interface with the system and what type of
parenting fits their lifestyleshort-term foster
care or long term adoption. If a family has
committed to and bonded with a child, it makes no
sense to search any longer. Social workers spend
a considerable amount of time being anxious about
the fact that we dont always know enough during
our first placement to make the best match
between the child and the resource family. We
want to move children because we learn more about
the kind of family that would be the best
match. We need to get more comfortable in doing
the best we can with the information we have.
Timely permanence is as important, if not more
important as a perfect match.  
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One Survey Looked at Four States Dual Licensure
Practices In-Depth

• Utah
• Missouri
• Oregon
• Texas

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What Did We Learn?

• Implications for Practice
• Implications for Policy

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PRACTICE IMPLICATIONS
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Practice Implication 1Child and Family
Matching Becomes an Earlier Concern.

• Difficulty in finding/making the right
  placement match between children and families, if
  the first placement is truly is to be the
  last/best.
• Dual licensure encourages earlier placements with
  resource families who can support the
  reunification process and also serve as permanent
  resource if children cannot return to their
  parents.
• It may mean that staff will need to make
  placements with resource families without the
  same amount of information about the child and
  the family-- as was common practice in adoptive
  or even pre-adoptive placements

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Practice Implication 2 Family-Centered Practice
and Reunification Continue to Be a Critically
Important Focus.

• The practice framework for dual licensure needs
  to be rooted in family-centered principles and
  strategies a framework that seeks to preserve
  childrens ties to their families of origin by
  involving other related or non-related family
  resources to support that process and serve as
  backup permanent resource if needed.
• If a child is placed with a foster/adoptive
  family, overburdened child welfare staff may see
  a child as safe and successfully placed in a
  home that can serve as a permanent option if
  needed, and therefore may not work as diligently
  towards reunification.

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Practice Implication 2 (cont)Family-Centered
Practice and Reunification Continue to Be a
Critically Important Focus.

• Staff will need to be provided a toolbox of
  resources to support this approach to practice
  such as family-centered assessment instruments,
  consistent and frequent supervision, a pool of
  resource families who understand their role as
  mentor to the birth parents, and a practice model
  that supports open and inclusive case planning
  with parents and resource families.

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Practice Implication 3Systems Re-organization
Supports Dual Licensure and Enhances Continuity
of Relationships For Children With Families and
Staff

• States and counties that have been successful in
  implementing a dual licensure model have
  reorganized their systems in ways that support
  earlier planning and decision-making around
  permanency for children.
• Rather than having separate foster care and
  adoptive units, many have combined these units
  and integrated practice.
• In these reorganized units, a single worker stays
  with the child regardless of the outcomes of the
  case, i.e. reunification, guardianship or
  adoption.
• With this continuity of relationship, the child
  and family do not have to tell their story more
  than once, and the worker who was with the child
  during the attempted reunification phase,
  supports the child in the transition to the goal
  of adoption, should that be necessary.

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Practice Implication 4Keep the pool growing
Ongoing recruitment is urgently needed.

• States were concerned that by encouraging foster
  parents to become adoptive parents they would
  substantively and dangerously diminish their pool
  of foster parents.
• While this is in fact a reality, most individuals
  surveyed believe that timely permanency for
  children is worth the extra demands it places on
  the system to continually recruit and train new
  foster parents as resources for children and
  families.
• Dual licensure requires intensive efforts on the
  part of public and private agencies to expand
  their recruitment efforts and often require a
  shift in the message about the role of a diverse
  pool of families who can meet the complex needs
  of children and families.

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Recent Research indicates that states are trying
new recruitment strategies

• Increasingly states are partnering with
  communities to design and implement
  community-specific recruitment strategies.
  Shared ownership for the quality and quantity
  outcomes is being developed through these
  partnerships.
• States are targeting recruitment for specific
  kinds of childrenin addition to blanket
  recruitment strategies.
• States are partnering with corporate America in
  new ways to generate new interest and support for
  the recruitment process.
• States are counting the costasking what is the
  actual cost associated with the recruitment of a
  new family.
•      

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Recruitment of Resource Families

• Recruitment messages are slowly beginning to
  change as states are asking resource families to
  serve as either the foster family or the adoptive
  family.based on the final permanency plan for
  the child.
• Training is starting to address more specifically
  the complexity of the role of resource families
  (Mary Ford form NACAC is developing very targeted
  questions to be posed to potential resource
  families ---more to come on this!)

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Recruitment of Resource Families

• States are pursuing performance-based contracting
  with the community based social service
  providerestablishing new expectations for
  recruitment and retention.

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Practice Implication 5Resource Family
Understanding and Support of the Permanency
Planning Process is Critical

• Dual licensure is likely to be successfully
  implemented when resource families understand and
  can support the process of Permanency Planning
  a process which is grounded in the belief that
  whenever safely possible, reasonable efforts
  should be made to help children remain with or be
  returned to their birth families and that
  parents, foster parents and agencies must work
  together to achieve the range of permanency
  outcomes.

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Practice Implication 5 (cont)Resource Family
Understanding and Support of the Permanency
Planning Process is Critical

• Resource families must support and even
  facilitate frequent visitation between the child
  and their biological family
• Resource families need to see themselves as a
  support system to the birth family
• Full disclosure is a part of every discussion.

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Full Disclosure Means

•   Open, honest, respectful discussion with birth
  family and the resource family of their rights,
  responsibilities, timeframes, permanency options,
  consequences, expectations of the agency gentle
  confrontation about ambivalence to plan or be
  involved in planning.
•  

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Full Disclosure
It honors the integrity of the process and
ensures that birth parents and resource parents
have the same information, thereby allowing them
to make informed decisions. Full disclosure
provides the birth parents with a lay of the
land and a road map of what needs to occur and
when, if their children are to be returned home.

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Full Disclosure
It also involves cheering them on, offering
feedback, and gentle confrontation of planning
and parenting ambivalence. "Full disclosure"
also provides resource parents with a clear set
of expectations about their role of mentoring and
supporting the birth family whenever safely
possible.
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Intriguing State Full Disclosure Strategies
  Texas-We have developed what we call Success
Quest. It is a parent orientation provided by
our Intensive Permanency Specialists for all
birth parents who have had their children removed
within the past two weeks. We encourage resource
families to attend with birth families. In a
sensitive, non-threatening manner, Success Quest
lets both the birth and the resource family know
exactly what is happening to the child. family.
We walk through the law, we describe what will
happen in court, tell them exactly when court
hearings will be held we and we thoroughly inform
them of their rights and responsibilities. We
describe our Permanency Planning Teams and we go
over a generic service plan to show them what
they look like and what will be submitted to the
court. Additionally, a judge who is very
committed to kids and families, created a video
for our use. The video that is about 20 minutes
long and further answers families questions
about the law and the judicial process  
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State Full Disclosure Strategies
North Dakota-Full disclosure is what makes the
process honest and Concurrent Planning possible.
When you lay out the options clearly for birth
parents and then give them every opportunity to
succeed, provide the services that all agree are
needed and still the family still does not make
the changes required to allow them to safely
parent their children, you know at the end of the
day, when you file the TPR, you have done your
job
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What Needs to Shift at the Practice Level to
Realize This Kind of System Reform

• Family Centered Assessment
• Systemic Thinking
• Individualized-need driven service
  planning
• Outcome driven service planning
• Strength Focused Practice
• Following a child and family from
  case opening to case closure
• Meaningful Utilization Review
• Data Used as a Teaching Tool

• Child Focused Assessment
• Linear Thinking
• Menu Driven Service Planning
• Process driven service planning
• Deficit Focused Practice
• Internal Hand Off--breaking continuity of
  relationship
• Compliance Monitoring
• Decisions without Data

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POLICY IMPLICATIONS
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Policy Implication 1 Equity in Regulatory
Standards and Due Process for Foster and
Pre-adoptive Families

• Our discussions with survey participants
  highlighted the differential treatment of foster
  and adoptive families.
• If we are expecting that children placed in both
  foster and adoptive homes be equally safe, then
  we need to afford them equal protections.
• If we are asking foster and pre-adoptive parents
  to take on similar roles, they need to have
  similar rights and equal preparation. Today they
  do not.

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Policy Implication 1(cont)

• Foster parents go through a rigorous home study
  and training process to become licensed. Once
  licensed they are afforded protections and rights
  under the fair hearing and grievance processes.
  Adoptive parents are certified or approvednot
  licensed.
• While the physical home study and criminal
  background checks may be comprehensive, many
  pre-adoptive parents are offered little training
  or educational support. If their efforts to
  adopt are denied, they have no access to the
  appeal or grievance process.

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Policy Implication 2 Equity in Post Adoption
Financial Support is Needed

• Some states provide lower adoption subsidy rates
  than foster care rates, which poses barriers to
  adoption for some families.
• A family that relies on the foster care payment
  and Medicaid coverage to meet the childs health
  care needs, will struggle with a reduction in
  these resources.
• This may impact the stability of the adoptive
  placement. Several foster parents shared during
  interviews that the only reason they did not
  pursue formal adoption was the loss of public
  support that was equal to the foster care
  payment.

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Policy Implication 3 Examining Whether Or Not
Dual Licensure Enhances Or Impedes Relative
Caregivers Options.

• Under the 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act,
  relative and non-relative foster care requires
  the same licensing rigor.
• During the survey, the state of Oregon raised
  questions regarding how this mandate will impact
  the practice of dual licensure.
• Should relatives who are wiling to care for a
  member of their family be asked to go through the
  process of dual licensure?
• Does this ultimately serve as a deterrent to
  relatives willingness to take on this
  complicated and difficult care giving role?
• If as a result of the implementation of dual
  licensure, we see a decrease in the number of
  relatives willing to provide care, the
  applicability of this model for relatives may
  need to be revaluated.

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What does it All Mean to the Practice of Child
Welfare?

• Over the past twenty years the child welfare
  system has been working rigorously to define best
  practice.
• Many child welfare agencies across the country
  have embraced family-centered, strength focused,
  culturally responsive work as being the best and
  most effective way to serve children and
  families.
• More recently through the work of Linda Katz, the
  field has added concurrent planning and the use
  of full disclosure to the list of best practice
  strategies for child welfare workers.
• Based on the lessons learned from this survey, it
  appears that dual licensure may be the next
  addition to the toolbox of best practices for
  the child welfare system.